The Moz Q&A Community

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

301 Redirects - Page Authority Not Transferring

Recently we've created new versions of pages using a tab system to display page content, rather than having multiple pages compete for the same keywords. Two specific, and relatively high traffic pages were converted. Both pages were 301 redirected from the old to their new versions.

I've been monitoring each over the past few weeks, and it still seems that barely any of the Page Authority of the original pages is passing to their respective new versions. Using the MOZ tool bar to see Page Authority; I load the original URL of either page, I see a PA of around 65 for each, which then gets reduced to 25 for one of the pages and a measly PA of 1 for the other new page (after being redirected).

I know Page Authority won't transfer entirely, but could someone shed some light on why it might be as poor as it currently is or give some advice on how to rectify the problem?

4 Responses

Moz fresh index will take time. Till time, you do not need to worry. If 301 redirect is done correctly - sooner or later - the page will get its due authority in not only Moz but bigger canvas of Google too.

Unfortunately, my site has experienced a similar problem for about two months now, so I hope you have better luck than we did.

We 301 redirected one of our pages to a new, better quality page that contained very similar content. After some time, Moz gave it the same page authority that the old page had, and it seemed as if the redirect worked fine. However, we kept waiting for Google to pick up the new page in the SERPs, which never happened. Our previous page was on the first page results for two important search terms, but our new page does not rank well for anything.

One possible explanation for this might be that although the link juice was passed to the new page, we never got any new links to the new page; the only links are all old and through the redirect. So, maybe it might appear that the new page has little relevancy/popularity now, and so it is not ranking.

I think you'll probably just need to wait for the next Mozscape index (or the one after that) - depending on how recently you put the 301 in place. The current index likely doesn't have enough information to properly tell you the current PA of your new pages.

How is your traffic to the pages? Are you seeing a significant drop in organic search traffic? If everything seems to be normal, but the only thing your concerned with is the Moz Page Authority - I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.